Limestone Walling for Beginners

The wall beside the front gates progresses slowly.  This is not really because of the poor weather, as I have done a lot of work on it in this last week by second guessing the weather forecast.  The lack of speed is simply because building a proper stone wall is a laborious task which cannot easily be done more quickly, especially by an amateur such as me.  The new wall is hidden behind this fence panel (photo right) to the left of the front door, and extends to the boundary wall on the extreme left.

Before finalizing the design of this wall I did a fair bit of research to see what sorts of wall could be described as the local style.  Although this was interesting, I actually got confused as there were so many slightly different styles which I had never noticed until I took fifty pictures of various local walls!  I therefore settled on the obvious idea of making it the same design as the boundary wall that it meets, although I am adding on the top some coping stone which was removed from the front wall where I put in the driveway (see photo at the bottom).  The end of the wall has to be 17" wide as that is the width of the reclaimed cut stones with pintles for gate hinges (which I bought last year), and the lower one can be seen in place in the photo left.  As the coping stones which I have are 14" wide, the wall will have to narrow slightly both as it rises and as it goes further away from the hinge line. It also has a slight bend in it, which is why the courses look odd in the photo left (NB It is about 27" high here and still needs pointing).  The finished wall will be about 6 ft high at the end for the gate hinges (i.e. the left hand end in the photo), and about 8 ft long, so that I will have a pair of gates beside the front door, and then the wall will extend across to the external garden wall.  The soil rises as you get closer to the garden wall, so the height above ground will be only about 4 ft at that end; to aid security, I will plant blackberries which are growing freely here - they are really nasty so will be quite an effective deterrent.

I am using a 3:1 mix of sharp sand and Castle NHL5 plus a small amount of building sand for the mortar of the main structure; possibly I could have used NHL3.5, but I wasn't sure so went for the "eminently hydraulic" NHL5 (see the Mike Wye website for explanations!).  For pointing I shall use a 3:1 mix which I have already tested and made up, using local sharp sand and lime putty as this will give me a good match with colour seen locally.  I think I read somewhere that it helps a wall if the outermost mortar is more porous than the internal mortar.

Technically I am repairing the wall, as I found the old foundations of a brick wall whilst digging the foundations for this one.  I am embarrassed to admit that the foundation is comprised of concrete blocks as I want this wall to be solid and to outlast me.  I know that lots of old walls stay standing for umpteen years but I bet that the people who put those up had a lot more skill than me! 

It might not be obvious but it is essential that limestone is laid in the correct orientation: the strata in the stone must be horizontal, as this is how the sedimentary stone was formed; if you lay it on its side then the strength is reduced significantly and it might well split.  It helps a lot if you can lay each course using stones of a uniform thickness, and you should also try to use the thicker stones at the bottom of the wall (but that might just be to save lifting heavy stones up high!).  The shape of the stone is clearly important as well; I am building a wall of squared faced limestone by re-using old stones which are already essentially in the shape of blocks.  You can do a wall using rubble, which sounds terrible but means that the blocks are not squared and you probably have to use the natural face caused when the stone is split.  Even then, you still want to build it in courses, but they can go up and down gently with a varying thickness, rather than being in neat horizontal lines.

I am trying to make the wall look as though it has been there for ages by using weathered stone which looks grey rather than yellow, and the source of a lot of this was the driveway cut through a low wall (the right hand gap in the photo, right).  However, that only gave about 20 sq ft of stone, and I probably need 50-60 sq ft.  I have also got some various bits of stone which were lying around this property, plus some yellow stone from under the kitchen floor, plus some more grey bits found when digging the foundations for the extension.  More recently I had some good fortune when the digging of a soakaway in the churchyard two weeks ago yielded another 5 sq ft of lovely squared blocks which have dried out and look very good.  [Top tip: sodden limestone and bricks dry out very well if you remove all the earth and mortar, leave them outside (raised off the ground on some old batten) and brush it periodically with a stiff hand brush.]

One obvious reason for the poor rate of completion is that my own skills are limited - after all, like many other tasks on this house, I have never done this before.  Although I have a good idea of how it should be done, there is no substitute for experience.  Another reason is that the supply of stone is limited (and the stone has been spread over a good area of the intended lawn), which means that the choice of each stone is quite time-consuming, but pre-sorting the stone by thickness helps speed things up.  I try to choose all the stones for several feet of a single course before mortaring them all in as that seems to speed things up as well.  I do actually find the job quite satisfying; this is possibly due to my mathematical bent and my liking for jigsaws.  I also used to play Tetris and am good at packing the car for going camping.

My final reason for the slow progress is that it is very tiring work.  My elbows feel strained and I have been sleeping very well recently.  Hopefully I can make more progress in the next week or two, and I'll post details when I unveil the wall to the public!

Walls, Weather and the Olympic Torch

Since I last posted more than two weeks ago, I really have been trying to stop getting annoyed with the weather and just get on with the various walls which I need to build.  However, I have to report, just in case it's not obvious or you're lucky enough to not have been in the UK recently, that progress on walls has been frustratingly slow because since then I've only done about three days work thanks to our "summer".

One achievement is that I have done a good bit of work on the second wall end in the front gateway of the driveway.  This was an essential precursor to doing the main wall beside the house as it needed to have first choice of the available stone in order to match the rest of the wall.  It isn't finished or perfect but I am quite satisfied with it.  Its public position means that it gets more attention than I might like and it will still need more work such as setting the coping stone.  The weather has been so bad that I've not even taken a photo yet, but will do so soon.

Such is the rarity of decent weather that I recently had to choose between using a fine day to maximum benefit by doing more walling or going and see the Olympic torch which passed nearby.  In fact, we were living in London not far from Tower Bridge when the Olympics were "won" in 2005 and we decided then that it would be a good idea to have moved out of London before the event happened.  Somehow one knows that the public disruption will be quite intolerable for those residents who have a reasonable desire to actually work almost as normal.  You won't be surprised that such is my level of enthusiasm for the Olympics that the wall won and I spent a productive and tiring afternoon doing half a course of the wall beside the front door.   

OK, yes the Olympic torch passing is a once in a lifetime event, but there are many other things I wish that I had done in my life, and I have learned to have few regrets.  One thing that I do still regret was when Concorde was returned to service (in 2002 I think) after the Paris accident; passenger numbers were low so they were offering a day trip to New York (with one way on Concorde) for £1,000 but, even though I could have afforded it, I persuaded myself that there would be other opportunities.  Of course, when they suddenly pulled the plug less than two years later, there were no good deals then!

Finally, I should record the first anniversary of our actual move into this property.  This causes me firstly to ask where the year has actually gone?  There still seems so much to do and, as far as I am concerned, relatively little seems to have been accomplished of what I expected to do (but when I say this, Jane says that I shouldn't be so hard on myself).  I know I can't blame it all on the weather.  Once you are actually living in your house, the priorities all change and I have deliberately told myself that I am retired so what is the hurry?  I still refuse to have a huge list of tasks as that would be too depressing, but I do try to decide at the start of each week exactly what I'd like to achieve in that week; however, that brings me back to the vagaries of the current weather...